Brazen Irish
Really Experienced
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2004
- Posts
- 167
I've always been a nut for a good nature show and tonight I caught something on PBS that really drew my eye. Deep Sea Invasion by Nova. The program is about an algae, Caulerpa taxifolia , developed by humans for aesthetic appeal in aquariums and what has occurred once is has been introduced into the ocean. Toxic to marine life, capable of self-cloning to allow a single segment of the plant to spawn a new batch, it's spreads like wildfire and is destroying the Mediterranean. It's also known to grown in four countries on nine continents.
As for Jacques Cousteau's tie in? A blurb taken directly from the transcripts.
"Jousson's discovery proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the taxifolia in the Mediterranean had not drifted in from the tropics. Monaco's argument that the appearance of taxifolia was part of a natural cycle of change in the sea did not hold up. It wasn't long before people also realized that if the findings were right, the most obvious source of the alien invasion was the Monaco Oceanographic Museum itself.
The museum was known to have had taxifolia in its tropical tanks and was also directly above the site of the first known infestation. Yet to suggest that the museum was even unwittingly responsible carried huge political and scientific implications. It meant the institute had somehow unknowingly allowed material from its aquarium tanks to get into the sea. Even worse, the most likely time for all this to have happened was in the early 1980s when the museum had been run by a man with an international reputation for marine research, Jacques Cousteau.
For years he'd been the father of French marine biology, a hero of marine conservation. The irony was that to accuse the Monaco Museum of even accidentally releasing a rogue seaweed into the sea, was to hold some of the most famous names in marine conservation responsible for what many now regarded as an ecological disaster. The museum flatly denied any link between the taxifolia in its tanks and the taxifolia below its walls and questioned the validity of the DNA findings."
I found it shocking, and horribly ironic. The show itself is very noteworthy and for those capable, I recommend watching it, or in the very least, going to Deep Sea Invasion Site for several articles upon the subject.
As for Jacques Cousteau's tie in? A blurb taken directly from the transcripts.
"Jousson's discovery proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the taxifolia in the Mediterranean had not drifted in from the tropics. Monaco's argument that the appearance of taxifolia was part of a natural cycle of change in the sea did not hold up. It wasn't long before people also realized that if the findings were right, the most obvious source of the alien invasion was the Monaco Oceanographic Museum itself.
The museum was known to have had taxifolia in its tropical tanks and was also directly above the site of the first known infestation. Yet to suggest that the museum was even unwittingly responsible carried huge political and scientific implications. It meant the institute had somehow unknowingly allowed material from its aquarium tanks to get into the sea. Even worse, the most likely time for all this to have happened was in the early 1980s when the museum had been run by a man with an international reputation for marine research, Jacques Cousteau.
For years he'd been the father of French marine biology, a hero of marine conservation. The irony was that to accuse the Monaco Museum of even accidentally releasing a rogue seaweed into the sea, was to hold some of the most famous names in marine conservation responsible for what many now regarded as an ecological disaster. The museum flatly denied any link between the taxifolia in its tanks and the taxifolia below its walls and questioned the validity of the DNA findings."
I found it shocking, and horribly ironic. The show itself is very noteworthy and for those capable, I recommend watching it, or in the very least, going to Deep Sea Invasion Site for several articles upon the subject.
